Letter: Weather extremes are our future

Climate scientists have been warning us about the dangers of more extreme weather due to global warming because a warmer atmosphere contains more energy. The Washington Post article on global ocean circulation being vulnerable to shutdown because of global warming, republished by The Gazette on Jan. 4, says that such a shutdown would cause global cooling ('Scientists say the global ocean circulation may be more vulnerable to shutdown than we thought”).

Dr. James Hansen, former head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, during the Q&A period of a presentation at Creighton University in Omaha last April, asserted that the last ice age was caused by global warming, and that the next one will be too; even though he once said that another ice age was impossible as long as man inhabited the planet. He used, as the basis for his argument, the same mechanism put forward in the Washington Post article and in the movie 'The Day After Tomorrow”, i.e., the shutdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC).

He went on to explain that cooling of the Polar Regions caused by the shutdown of the AMOC would increase the temperature gradient between the poles and the tropics, thus causing more extreme weather, which according to the Washington Post article is another climate tipping point. So our weather will become more extreme, no matter whether Planet Earth goes into runaway global warming, as was predicted by many climate scientists, or another ice age, and climate scientists will be able to argue they predicted it whatever the outcome.

Fred Hubler

Cedar Rapids